MAGIC AND WONDER
honestly, yet who show a certain reluctance to accept the universe of order, and hark back rather to the old magical transformation.
One of these novelists is Fielding. Criticism has stressed his manliness, his insistence on frankness, his ability to deal with a fact. Yet in none of his stories, except Jonathan Wild, does he treat his heroes as though character were really conditioned by causes and consequences. We watch the good and the bad traits in Tom Jones, for the first twenty-five years of his life, and then we are asked to believe that, once happily married, he reformed, and his faults not only disappeared, but obligingly left no traces. In Amelia we must believe the same miracle of Booth, with the added difficulty that he is older when he reforms. In the minor details of both stories, as also in Joseph Andrews there
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